How do atmospheres—those subtle, fleeting affective presences that co-shape our perception of the world—come into being? What forces enable and constrain their appearance? How to research these complex processes in a non-reductive way? Maybe by entering in a state of resonance?

Contingent Agencies, an artistic research project initiated by Nikolaus Gansterer and Alex Arteaga, investigates these questions by observing how human and non-human agencies co-create atmospheres. More precisely we investigate how the activation of individual agencies within a situation—from light to animals, artifacts to sounds, matter to vegetation, color to decay—conditions the emergence of these sensuous and vibrating forms of presence. This project combines artistic practices of notation, reflection, showing and sharing within conceptual frameworks such as phenomenology, enactivism, and new materialism.

Resonance lies at the heart of this inquiry, both thematically and methodologically, acting as an empathic mode of engaging with constitutive forces of the world as well as offering an alternative to representation within notation practices. Here, notation is performed as an act of “getting in touch”—a resonant encounter with atmospheres that captures dynamic exchanges and entanglements between notator and environment. Therefore each artifact of notation and reflection is endowed with a unique resonance, inviting contingent and unexpected findings.

This presentation will discuss the project’s framework and introduce into its specific methodology, its newly published book and complementary online archive, featuring artifacts—texts, drawings, sounds, videos—as an invitation for a wider research community to join the inquiry. By exploring atmospheres as emergent, relational presences, we propose a new mode of perceiving, co-inhabiting, and imagining our fragile environments—shifting from mere response towards a mutual responsibility, and promoting resonance as a poetic act of co-worlding.